Feedback sought on new cyrus-utils project

[Jeremy H. <jh...@op...>]

Hi Larry and Ken,

I noticed on info-cyrus that a lot of the same questions were being asked
and answered, and that a lot of people were creating the same basic
maintenance scripts. I figured that we could avoid these two problems by
creating a central repositorary for answers to FAQs, and for
patches/scripts.

I felt that this repositorary should be in the 'bazaar' mode of
operation--lots of people involved in lots of ways, with only loose
coordination. People would post snippets of information for doc managers to
organise into a structure (such as a faq-o-matic type setup), and little
scripts would be uploaded and worked on over time.

So I've created a Sourceforge project 'cyrus-utils' to address this, since
this is just the kind of thing that Sourceforge is good for. There are two
sub-projects--cyrus-utils-scripts and cyrus-utils-docs, each with their own
mailing list:
  https://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=33489

The docs are currently in a FAQ:
  http://cyrus-utils.sourceforge.net/faq/
and each script/patch has a bit of documentation too:
  https://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=33489

I'd also like to put the Cyrus docs in the distribution up on Sourceforge
since many people don't include the docs in their packages, but obviously
this depends on whether it's OK with you. The cyrus-docs project files will
include references and quotes from the official documentation as
appropropriate. I also plan to write a 'troubleshooting HOWTO' to answer the
50% of info-cyrus emails that would be solved by following well-understood
troubleshooting procedures.

We'll probably unify all this under some better system like faq-o-matic in
the next few days.

The utilities are available from Sourceforge too:
  https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=33489
although most of these scripts have homes elsewhere, this site provides a
single point for users to access.

At this stage we're still uploading files and finalising structure, but I
wanted to get some feedback from you guys. I'd love to see a link to the
project from the Cyrus Project home page and in the Cyrus docs. I'm sorry
it's still all such a mess, but I figured it'd be better to get input from
you early in the process rather than later!

At this stage the following people are involved:
  Jeremy Howard: Project Manager
  Tarjei Huse: Doc Manager
  Alain Turbide: Websieve
  Gary Mills: Easysieve, imapcreate, Sendmail LMTP conf
  Jules Agee: imapmigrate
  Kevin Menard and Simon Loader: LDAP/MySQL auth patch

So what do you think? Everyone who's gotten involved so far has expressed
their excitement at having a central point for coordinating involvement of
the user community to documenting and extending Cyrus IMAPd. My hope is that
it will increase the number of users, reduce the noise on the mailing list,
reduce the admin workload of you guys so you can concentrate on the cool
enhancements we all bug you for, and encourage the development of standard
powerful administration and maintenance tools.